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When is good enough good enough?

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We follow a practice for defining concepts and selecting terms for Microsoft Dynamics AX that names these concepts in the real-world. This practice ensures that the concepts and terms that we are introducing in Microsoft Dynamics AX are accurate and precise with respect to their domains.

Throughout the development cycle for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, we aligned, and in some cases, realigned concepts and their terms across the product. During this time, I addressed many terminology-related questions from internal stakeholders.

In this blog entry, I’d like to spend some time addressing one of the more frequently asked questions about our practice: How do we know whether the accuracy and precision we apply to defining concepts and selecting terms offer sufficient context to make them understandable in the real world?

To answer this question, I’d like to start by naming the audiences for our terminology work and their needs, and then by examining at a high level how we validated whether our users find the terms and their definitions understandable. Specifically:

  • Who needs to know the concepts that are realized in the product code and in the user interface?
  • How do we validate whether our audiences understand the terms and their definitions?

Audiences

The audiences for our terminology work include:

  • Partners who customize the product.
  • Customers who use the product.
  • Translations teams who translate and localize the product in 40+ languages.
  • Internal stakeholders, such as architects, user experience designers, usability researchers, program managers, developers, testers, writers, and editors who design, develop, test, and document the product.
  • Any person searching for organization resource management software terms and definitions, or any organization that may be evaluating our product.

Validating our terminology work

As with any new practice, we needed to measure our terminology work to determine whether the output—the accurate terms and precise definitions—benefits our audiences. So to address our stakeholders’ question we needed to ask our audiences what they think of the terms and definitions.

We collected feedback on our terminology objectives and strategies by conducting audience-based written surveys.

For the partner, customer and business software users, MBA students, and the general public audiences, our goal was to validate that the terms name their concepts and that their descriptions describe their concepts and are understandable in the context of specific areas of work.

We conducted two surveys—one for the partner audience and one for the customer and business software users, MBA students, and the general public audiences—that followed the following methodology.

Each survey:

  1. Offered a question pool that equaled 619 term entries. A term entry is one term and its definition.
  2. Mapped question groupings to the primary role that the survey respondent selected. For example, if a respondent identified their role as an accountant, they received a question grouping of accounting terms.
  3. Asked the following question for each term entry: Does the definition enable you to understand the concept?

The response options were:

  • Yes
  • No
  • I do not know because the concept does not apply to my work

The surveys for these audiences yielded the following results:

  • Partner survey – We are 95% confident that between 50% ± 13% of the respondents understood the concepts and the terms for their specific areas of work.
  • Customer and business software users, MBA students, and the general public survey – We are 95% confident that between 65% ± 11% of the respondents understood the concepts and the terms for their specific areas of work.

For the translation teams, our goals were to validate that terms and their definitions:

  • Are clear and precise.
  • Enable translators do perform their work.
  • Have lowered the inconsistent use of domain terms in the Microsoft Dynamics AX product.
  • Have lowered the variance of terms used as synonyms in the Microsoft Dynamics AX product.

We conducted one survey in which we asked the following questions of the translations teams.

  1. Is the language in term entries clear and precise?
  2. Do the term entries help you do your translation work?
  3. Has our terminology practice lowered the inconsistent use of domain terms for the purposes of translation work?
  4. Has our terminology practice lowered the variance of domain terms that are translated as synonyms?

For all questions, the response options were:

  • Yes
  • No

The survey yielded the following results:

  1. For question 1: We are 95% confident that between 74% ± 17% of the respondents validated that the terms and their definitions are clear and precise.
  2. For question 2: We are 95% confident that between 85% ± 13% of the respondents validated that the term entries enable translators to perform their work.
  3. For question 3: We are 95% confident that between 59% ± 19% of the respondents validated that our terminology practice has lowered the inconsistent use of domain terms.
  4. For question 4: We are 95% confident that between 56% ± 19% of the respondents validated that our terminology practice has lowered the variance of terms used as synonyms.

Conclusions: What we learned

The survey results offered valuable insights. For example, we learned that:

  • The practice that we follow for defining concepts and selecting terms that represent their concepts yields terms and definitions that are generally understandable and usable by our audiences.
  • When we apply an inaccurate term or various synonyms that represent one concept in the user interface, the audience will either adopt the term that is used in the interface or provide feedback that the term is inaccurate with respect to its domain.
  • When we define a concept imprecisely, the concept is less likely to be applicable product-wide and is more likely to be misunderstood by users of our product.
  • The use of synonyms is problematic and can be confusing for many languages that generally apply the same term to represent the same concept no matter the number of occurrences of that term.
  • Imprecise terms and definitions, for example, verbose or vague definitions, are more challenging for translations teams to translate or localize and to apply in their work.
  • We need to offer more term entries in our glossary.
  • Like all practices, the practice that we use to define concepts and select terms can be improved to even better enable the output for our audiences.
  • We need to increase the sample size for future terminology surveys.

Microsoft Dynamics AX glossary

I invite you to view and offer feedback on any or all of our Microsoft Dynamics AX term entries in the Microsoft Dynamics AX glossary. Peruse the glossary, and if you’d like, click the Feedback link at the bottom of any entry and let me know what you think. I’m interested in hearing from you.